Members are reminded that a book club is a hobby, not a hostage situation, and that nobody has yet finished the memoir.
LONDON, England (The London Prat) – Thursday evening, in the back room of the library, under a strip light that has been flickering since before I joined. I am writing to you because you could not come, and because someone ought to put on record what happened when the reading group of seven met to discuss a book that only three of us had opened.
On the book we did not read
You will remember that Desmond chose this month’s title, and that we agreed to let him because he had been so quiet since the sandwiches incident. It turned out to be a Victorian missionary memoir, six hundred pages long, with a preface longer than most modern novels. Desmond defended the choice by saying that it gives a rare glimpse of the period. Mrs Pereira replied that she has had a rare glimpse of the period from the other side of the bus window and did not require another.
I read ninety pages. In that time the author crossed a river, disapproved of the weather, disapproved of the porters, praised himself for his patience and spent eleven lines on his own digestion. If the book has a theme, it is that the writer was never wrong and that the river should have known better. Even so, I enjoyed it. The nineteenth century is a wonderful place to visit if you can leave before the sermon.
What interests me, every time, is the people in the margins. A good travel narrative from that era is about the traveller for three hundred pages and then about the guide for one sentence, and the whole genre depends on you not asking who knew the way. The serial novels of the same period, whether they came out in London or in the periodicals of Calcutta, at least had the decency to leave you wanting the next instalment. A memoir leaves you wanting a sandwich.
On the prize, which Folake will want to know about
When the conversation died, as it does about forty minutes in, I changed the subject to a book that had been written this century by someone who can actually plot. Africa.com reported that the Zimbabwean writer Simbarashe Kundizeza has won this year’s Caine Prize for African Writing, worth about 13,000 dollars, for a story called “The Blue Fighter”. It follows a boy named Tinashe whose family struggles after his father leaves his job to build fish tanks. The judges, chaired by the broadcaster Bola Mosuro, praised its handling of family, denial, loyalty and devotion, and the prize drew a record 407 submissions from 27 African countries.
I read that figure to the group twice. Four hundred and seven short stories, from twenty-seven countries, sifted by a panel of judges who then had to sit in a room and agree. I have been in a room with three people trying to agree on a pizza. The achievement of that jury is, to my mind, greater than the achievement of most governments, and they did it with only a prize and some coffee.
The five shortlisted stories will appear in the anthology “Felix Never Died and Other Stories”, which Folake should order for the group before Desmond finds out and suggests a missionary diary instead. Mrs Pereira says she will read it on the 436, which is the highest compliment a book can receive in this borough.
On the exhibition, and the typewriter
We drifted, as we always do, towards crime. The British Library has opened a show called Agatha Christie: A World of Mystery, which Euronews described as marking fifty years since her death. It runs into next summer and has nearly a hundred rare objects, including early manuscript drafts, exam notes and her personal typewriter, along with life-sized replicas of hospital dispensaries and a 1920s Orient Express carriage.
Desmond immediately wanted to know whether the carriage has seats. I said that I assumed the visitors were not expected to sit in a carriage inside a library. He said it was a missed opportunity. Mrs Pereira said that, in her experience, the only thing that happens on a train in a mystery is a death, and that she would prefer to remain standing.
I like the typewriter. I like any exhibition that puts the tool on a plinth and leaves the author a little to one side. The real mystery, after all, is how anyone writes anything. I have a laptop with eleven tabs open and a mug of tea gone cold. She had a machine that hammered. I think we all ought to admit that she had the better working conditions.
A note on stalls
You asked, in your last message, how the book stall at the weekend market is getting on. Badly, in the best way. A man next to me was selling a set of old encyclopaedias, and the label said “good condition, unread”. It reminded me of the farm listing I came across, the ad that says the equipment runs great and then admits the seller has not tried it. That is a more honest sales pitch than anything printed on the back of a paperback. I intend to put the same sentence on all of my stock: “Reads great. Have not tried it.”
We closed the meeting at nine, with a vote that was inconclusive in all of the usual ways. The next book will be a short one. I have asked the group to nominate titles under two hundred pages, in the hope that someone might finish.
If you want the long version of everything I read and mutter, it lives at more of my daily notes at The London Prat. For a longer look at how that sort of writing works, there is a long-running London site that jokes about everything and everyone, and on the British side of the shelf I would put a page of British news told with a straight face and a crooked eyebrow.
Come next month. I will bring the biscuits. Desmond will bring the grievance. It will be, I promise, a very short book.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/